The Enduring Shame of the Supersystem

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Settling in, are we, in this new Trumpian era of even more anti-social media chitter-chatter? Getting your daily fix of risible micro-content? Are youze part o’ the Resistance, that great borrowed WWII term for the washed, 401(k) masses vaulting to the thrones of fascist-occupied power, and starting the great take-back of all New Deal programmatic initiatives?

There are some large matters of entrenched corruption that you might consider before you go off clicking the day away. As Elizabeth Rosenthal documents in her breezy expose of the American Medical establishment, American Sickness, there is an appalling, nearly unregulated over-advertised monstrosity called the American health system that is destroying so many people’s lives and sanity with every mounting day.

The problem in learning the inside scoop on the skullduggery of these greedy, incompetent, disgusting mountebanks of the health system is that they match, in tone and venality, every other major American institutional system. Each one is a match, a duplicate, a combinator, with each other, hence the supersystem thesis of Fun Social Nihilism.

Quick: which is worse: the American legal system, the American incarceration system, the American political system, the American higher education system, the American tax code, the American religious scam, the American education system – see how tedious this gets? They are all irredeemable, whatever you score you give them, They are all affected by core natural processes that lead to this present wonderworld of metastasized moral and intellectual corruption. Mix the profit motive in with trademarked aversion to compensated, supported regulation, and you get all these decrepit, continent-destroying marvels of enfranchised stupidity and official malevolence.

Yet there’s gotta be hope, right? Who needs to hear that nihilistic nihilism – it’s boring and not good bait. You should, however, take a look at one cost of vain and illogical hope, the IPCC. Here we are as a species on this imperiled planet, and even the good guys, who have gotten together for decades in global hotspot after global hotspot, at the tremendous intellectual expense of papers and discussions, and there’s not one piece of augury for a rescuable planet for that large, delicate human ape.

It’s all supposed to work on voluntary regulation, as if the world’s power, unreachable capitalizer classes will simply let their advantages be stripped entirely. Even intrepid scientists ringing the alarm bell cannot refrain from last-chapter hopeismo, without ever having located even one small test case for voluntary self-abnegation to save the day for humanity. The Montreal Protocol made one class of death-delivering fossil fuel products have to stand by for a minute, while every other class of fossil fuel death -delivery has gone into hyper-production. Hope from that poor orphan?

If we can see the data clearly, we are obligated to reach a tentative conclusion, and then frame our chitter-chatterings accordingly. The American version of the supersystem is particularly corrupt and horrific on so many fronts that are quite inter-related and impenetrable, and no new-generation Sanders-Clintonian Third Wayer is going to make this tragic reality go away. We are stuck, just like all human beings have been stuck, and there is no value or psychological purpose in disregarding the traps around our feet.

Erich Fromm gave his diagnosis in 1952 in The Sane Society:

The mentally healthy person is the productive and unalienated person, the person who relates himself to the world lovingly,… who is in the process of being born as long as he is alive, and considers the gift of life as the most precious chance he has.

No human alive today is this risible version of constantly born-again swooner over life’s awesome riches. That person, if he or she ever lived, is either dead or fictitious. Every human is born but once, and inherits a social world not of his or her doing, one in which tasks and obligations come with arrant and bizarre stupidity. Only a lunatic thinks we are not trapped, and only a lunatic would counsel people to ignore their fate.